Electrical Engineers Learn The Hard Way

May 24, 2004

RAY: This puzzler is from Gary from Santa Clara, California. It's kind of an automotive puzzler.

Gary writes:

"As a shade tree mechanic, I've read many times that when removing a car's battery or doing electrical work, one is supposed to disconnect the negative terminal first, and only then, the positive terminal. Installation, as so many instructions say, is the reverse of that procedure.

"Now, as an electrical engineer, I scoffed at these instructions, because I knew that opening a circuit at any point was equivalent to opening it anywhere else. I just disconnected whatever terminal was handy. One day, I was helping a friend change the battery in his garden tractor. He happened to be an electrician, and he knew as well as I did that it didn't matter which terminal was removed first.

"But, as we learned that hard way that day, this isn't true. It does matter which is removed and replaced first.

"Why is that?"
RAY: Here's the answer. You're using a wrench to disconnect the battery cables. The wrench is made out of metal, of course. Now, if your wrench contacts a piece of metal that's connected to the frame, you've got a short circuit, because all the ground circuits are connected to the frame, and the negative terminal of the battery is connected to the frame.

So if you should, in disconnecting the positive terminal first, touch the wrench to a metal ground on the carÃ¢â‚¬â€

TOM: It's a short circuit between positive and negative and badda bing, badda bang!

RAY: It's tantamount to laying your wrench across the two terminals of the battery.

TOM: If you do that, run like hell!

RAY: It's too late to run!

TOM: Actually, this is quite dangerous because the battery can explode.

RAY: So the reason that you disconnect the negative first is if in the process of loosening the bolt to remove the negative terminal, the wrench should contact the frame, it doesn't make any difference.

TOM: Because the negative terminal is already connected to the frame.


Do we have, do we have a winner?

TOM: The winner is Monica Hartley from Houston, Texas. And for having her answer selected at random from among all the good answers that we got, Monica will win a $26 dollar gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division of Cartalk.com where she can get her father or someone else's father a Car Talk necktie, which features (as you know) in very small print the names of the people on the Car Talk staff like Picov Andropov, and Huey, Louie, Dewey.

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